SETI Institutehttps://alumni.berkeley.edu/taxonomy/term/1759/all
enShould Earth Try to Phone ET? Experts Clash Over Risks of Alerting Alienshttps://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2016-02-17/should-earth-try-phone-et-experts-clash-over-risks-alerting
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Glen Martin</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>If there’s an appropriate place to apply the <a href="http://www.sehn.org/precaution.html">Precautionary Principle</a>, beaming high-powered messages to exoplanets that could support intelligent life might seem a good place to start. Or maybe not. It all depends on one’s cosmic&nbsp;perspective.</p>
<p>As most ET buffs know, the idea of METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is <a href="http://www.seti.org/">SETI</a> (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) on steroids. SETI, of course, refers to the long-running effort to detect alien civilizations via the scanning of interstellar radio frequencies. METI kicks that process up from the passive to the active by trying to contact ETs directly via powerful radio dishes or lasers. The question lurking beneath the surface is one that has deeply embroiled both astronomers and Trekkies: Do we <em>really</em> want to let extraterrestrials know we’re&nbsp;here?</p>
<p class="pullquote left">What if they’re not the Steven Spiel­ber­gi­an kewpie doll kind of ali­en, but in­stead the froth­ing, ooz­ing-chartreuse-slime-from-every-pore, face-eat­ing&nbsp;vari­ety?</p>
<p>What if they’re not the Steven Spielbergian kewpie doll kind of alien, but instead the frothing, oozing-chartreuse-slime-from-every-pore, face-eating&nbsp;variety?</p>
<p>Citing sobering concerns, more than two dozen experts from the University of California and elsewhere have now signed <a href="http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/meti_statement_0.html">a statement</a> urging that Earthlings exercise caution before advertising our existence—insisting on “a worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion&#8230;before any message is sent.” But others want to proceed, among them Seth Shostak, director of research at the <a href="http://www.seti.org/">SETI Institute</a> in Mountain View, who recently publicly labeled fears about METI&nbsp;“overwrought.”</p>
<p>To some degree, of course, METI already is underway. In 1974, a pictogram was squirted into the ether by the massive radio antenna at <a href="https://www.naic.edu/">Arecibo</a>, Puerto Rico. In 1999 and 2003, a team led by Russian astronomer Aleksandr Zaitsev transmitted powerful “cosmic calls” from the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tNYS6WSHA4">Yevpatoria</a> Planetary Radar in Crimea. A Doritos commercial was broadcast to a star 42 light years away by the EISCAT European Arctic transmitter in 2008, and NASA beamed the Beatles tune “Across the Universe” toward the North Star in the same&nbsp;year.</p>
<p>But those are just initial yawps; we may be on the cusp of a METI explosion. Certainly, the means are there: The Arecibo dish literally is capable of transmitting the equivalent of “Yo, Dude,” across the galaxy. And technological advances are such that backyard radio astronomers could send their own messages into the void in less than two&nbsp;decades.</p>
<p class="pullquote right">Any civil­iz­a­tion we con­tact could be mil­len­nia or epochs ahead of us; it would thus be un­likely to view us as a threat, just as we are un­in­tim­id­ated by mewl­ing&nbsp;kit­tens.</p>
<p>And the will to yammer on a cosmic scale—at least among a certain cohort of scientists—exists as well. In a recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/opinion/sunday/messaging-the-stars.html?_r=0">op-ed in <i>The New York Times,</i></a>&nbsp;Shostak&nbsp;argues that space is vast and communications “won’t be breezy,” taking decades to establish even a minimal back-and-forth colloquy. Second, any civilization we contact could be millennia or epochs ahead of us; it would thus be unlikely to view us as a threat, just as we are unintimidated by mewling&nbsp;kittens.</p>
<p>Shostak also reasons that a METI moratorium would put undue research constraints on our “children and our children’s children.” And finally, he avers, the horse is out of the barn anyway: “Any extraterrestrials with technology advanced enough to threaten us will surely have antennas larger than our own, instruments that can pick up the television and radio signals broadcast willy-nilly since World War&nbsp;II.”</p>
<p>Not so fast, counter METI skeptics. That class includes UC Berkeley astronomy professor <a href="http://astro.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/marcy.html">Geoffrey Marcy</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNGF8abQxh0">Dan Werthimer,</a> the principle investigator of the UC-sponsored <a href="mailto:SETI@home">SETI@home</a>, director of the Center for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research, and an associate of the UC-supported Berkeley Wireless Research Center. Both men have signed the petition urging a go-slow approach to METI (as have several other luminaries, including Elon Musk and astrophysicist-cum-bestselling-sci-fi author <a href="http://www.davidbrin.com/">David Brin</a>).</p>
<p>“The great majority of astronomers think that transmitting is a terrible idea,” says Werthhimer. “METI was discussed at length at a recent AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference. Each speaker got up and discussed pros and cons, and then we took an informal poll. The overwhelming majority opposed active messaging—maybe two supported it. So there are only a few people in the science community who think, ‘Oh, there’s no risk,’ and seem intent on taking it upon themselves to speak for the entire human race. Because that’s what [a focused, high-powered] transmission amounts to. One person could cause consequences for the entire planet.”<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/image/alientext.jpg" style="width: 680px; height: 453px; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px;" /></p>
<p>So far, says Werthimer, no governmental body oversees METI, and no formal regulations apply to&nbsp;it.</p>
<p>“Most of us would like the National Academy of Sciences to look at the risks and potential benefits and issue guidelines, just as guidelines are issued for other potentially dangerous research, such as DNA sequencing,” says Werthimer. “In general such guidelines are voluntary, they’re not onerous, but they work very&nbsp;well.”</p>
<p>Scientist and sci-fi novelist Brin also opposes willy-nilly shout-outs to the stars, and discounts Shostak’s contention that radio and TV leakage over the past 80 years are comparable to focused METI&nbsp;blasts.</p>
<p>“Our best calculations show that it would take prodigious alien [receivers] to detect earthly radio, TV and radar transmissions, even those from the 1980s, which were our ‘nosiest’ decade,” Brin says. (Off-planet transmissions have waned significantly from that period due to the switch from broadcast to cable and fiber optic transmission modes.) “Focused transmissions magnify detectability by a factor of 10&nbsp;million.”</p>
<p>But how much of a potential threat do aliens pose if we can’t even find them? SETI searches have been conducted since the 1960s, and so far we’ve heard nothing that could be construed as anything other than cosmic background noise—pulsars, quasars, star-gulping black holes—but no ET equivalent of <em>I Love&nbsp;Lucy.</em></p>
<p>Brin, who debated Shostak on METI at the recent <a href="http://artsandsciences.colorado.edu/magazine/2015/03/conference-on-world-affairs-to-be-accessible-anywhere/">Conference on World Affairs</a> in Colorado, concurs that the interstellar jungle seems devoid of the bird screeches and primate hoots that you’d hear in its terrestrial analogue; and yes, that may be because there are no extraterrestrial birds and primates to screech and hoot. The deafening silence could simply reflect an utter absence of intelligent life.<img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/image/alien2.jpg" style="width: 375px; height: 563px; margin: 5px; float: left;" /></p>
<p>But it may mean something else—namely, that the denizens are deliberately keeping quiet. The intergalactic ecosystem may support more than placid, highly evolved grazers and browsers. Predators could be&nbsp;stalking.</p>
<p>“Maybe they know something we don’t” says&nbsp;Brin.</p>
<p>Most SETI researchers agree that trying to figure out possible alien motivations is a bootless endeavor. Who knows why they would be either friendly or hostile? If the latter, their rationale could range from a fear of long-term competition for galactic resources to a basic cultural imperative: They may find intelligent species other than their own innately repugnant. Or perhaps they are gourmands: Maybe unfamiliar intelligent life forms are their equivalent of Beluga caviar. In any event, the “why” of any response, benign or antagonistic, would likely remain unfathomable to mere&nbsp;Earthlings.</p>
<p>But even if the aliens got a burr under their saddle, what could they do about it? Any civilization we contact is likely to be scores—or hundreds, or thousands—of light years away. Don’t such vast distances equate to safety? Not&nbsp;necessarily.</p>
<p>“Say they’ve learned to accelerate matter using anti-matter,” says Brin. “That’s a technique that could be within our own capability in a century or so, and it could be used to push material at 1/10 the speed of&nbsp;light.”</p>
<p>At those velocities, a chunk of iron the size of a Manhattan skyscraper could reach Earth from a distant star system in mere decades or centuries. Calculating an intersection point with the Earth’s orbit would be relatively easy, says Brin. And if such a wad of metal moving at such a clip hit our home planet, Brin says, “It could pretty much wipe everything clean down to the bacteria&nbsp;level.”</p>
<p>To that the trepidatious layperson can only add: Yikes. So maybe it’s a good idea to muzzle the radio dishes, hunker down, and shut up? Don’t count on that happening. The number of scientists who want to transmit are in a minority, but they are a determined minority. Requests have been made to NASA and the National Science Foundation, the joint administrators of Arecibo, to transmit from the radio telescope between routine scans for potentially dangerous asteroids. And nobody knows, of course, what the Russians will do. Plus, the <a href="http://www.universetoday.com/24444/china-building-huge-500-meter-radio-telescope/">Chinese</a> are building a radio telescope that will dwarf Arecibo, greatly expanding the range—and the temptation—for interstellar outreach. Then there are all those amateur SETI buffs who may be able to order interstellar transmission kits through Amazon by 2030 or&nbsp;so.</p>
<p>“All we’re asking,” says Werthimer, “is for people to think about this. Just think before you&nbsp;transmit.”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/science-health">Science + Health</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/aliens">aliens</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/meti">METI</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/seti">SETI</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/search-extaterrestrial-intelligence">Search for Extaterrestrial Intelligence</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/messaging-extraterrestrial-intelligence">Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/seth-shostak">Seth Shostak</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/seti-institute">SETI Institute</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/geoffrey-marcy">Geoffrey Marcy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/dan-werthimer">Dan Werthimer</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/setihome">SETI@home</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/university-california">University of California</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/david-brin">David Brin</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/elon-musk">Elon Musk</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/astronomy">astronomy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/space">space</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/arecibo">Arecibo</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/nasa">NASA</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/national-science-foundation">National Science Foundation</a></div></div></div>Wed, 15 Apr 2015 23:31:52 +0000Vicki Haddock6553 at https://alumni.berkeley.eduDoomsday 1: An Asteroid Wiped Out the Dinosaurs—Will We Be Next?https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2014-apocalypse/doomsday-1-asteroid-wiped-out-dinosaurs-will-we-be-next
<div class="field field-name-field-lede field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Countdown to the Apocalypse: Direct Hit</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Chris A. Smith</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><i>Editors’ Note: The Summer 2014 issue of </i>California<i> magazine is called “This is the End.” Every day this week: a different catastrophic&nbsp;scenario.</i></p>
<p>It started with a&nbsp;flash.</p>
<p>At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, Russia, a southern industrial city known mostly for making tractors. Thanks to smartphones, surveillance cameras, and Russian auto-dash cams, we have a voluminous record of what happened&nbsp;next.</p>
<p>As the glow faded, a fireball the size of a six-story building blazed across the northern sky. It hit the atmosphere going Mach 50, fueled by the energy of more than 20 Hiroshimas and trailing a dirty-white plume. In a cameraphone video from that morning, a few men stood in the snow gawping at the fireball above their&nbsp;heads.</p>
<p>“What do you think?” one guy asked, more curious than afraid. “Maybe it was a satellite? <i>Sputnik?</i>”</p>
<p>Then the shockwave hit. The cameraman screamed and the picture spun wildly as the earth shook beneath his feet. The blast knocked people to the ground and burned the skin off others. Car alarms blared for miles around. Closed-circuit video feeds showed windows blowing inward, walls collapsing, people huddling under desks. Flying debris cracked open a statue of Alexander Pushkin in a library. There were no deaths, somehow, but 1,500 were injured. Eight months later, researchers pulled a half-ton chunk of the asteroid out of a frozen lake more than 40 miles from the&nbsp;city.</p>
<iframe width="640" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tq02C_3FvFo?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>Nobody had seen it coming. This “near-Earth object,” as scientists have dubbed such asteroids, emerged from the direction of the sun, rendering it all but invisible to ground-based&nbsp;telescopes.</p>
<p>The visitation was a reminder that, at some point, an asteroid measured better in miles than feet will come for us all. According to a 1994 study published in the scientific journal <i>Nature</i>, we stand a 1-in-40,000 chance of dying in a “cosmic impact.” That’s more likely than perishing in a tornado, and less likely than in an airplane crash. At least in theory, the world possesses the technology to both detect and counter this threat. But as things stand right now, the next big impact might play out much as Chelyabinsk did: a short, sharp, and entirely unexpected shock—only with casualties in the millions or even&nbsp;billions.</p>
<p>Franck Marchis, a former UC Berkeley astronomer who is now a principal investigator at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, says “It won’t happen tomorrow. But it will happen. It’s a matter of&nbsp;time.”</p>
<p>It has happened before. Our corner of the universe is choked with millions of asteroids large and small—early astronomers referred to them as “vermin of the skies.” Composed of smashed-together rock and metal, they are the remnants of our solar system’s formation 4.6 billion years ago, like leftover rebar and concrete at a construction site. They travel through space according to their own particular gravitational logic. Marchis, who had an asteroid named for him in 2007, likens the arrangement to billiard balls on “a gigantic pool table.” Thankfully, most of these asteroids never come anywhere near the Earth. Inevitably, though, the orbits of some of them intersect with ours. Most of them burn up upon entering our atmosphere, too small to do major damage. But there are&nbsp;exceptions.</p>
<p>The largest impact in modern history occurred in 1908, when a 120-foot-wide asteroid (or perhaps a comet; it’s tough to say without a visual record) wiped out more than 800 square miles of forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia. Due to Tunguska’s isolation, the blast killed mostly trees and reindeer, but it was big enough and hot enough to have flattened the San Francisco Bay Area. In a village 280 miles from ground zero, an Irkutsk newspaper reported that peasants “ran into the street in a panicky fear, old women cried; everyone thought that the end of the world had&nbsp;come.”</p>
<p>Almost 4,000 miles to the west, the sky over England that night was “a delicate salmon pink,” according to one observer. “I myself was aroused from sleep at 1:15, and so strong was the light at this hour, that I could read a book by it in my chamber quite&nbsp;comfortably.”</p>
<p class="pullquote left"> NASA says it has loc­ated 93 per­cent of “plan­et-killer” asteroids and is ex­pec­ted to find the rest of them by 2020. But that still leaves po­ten­tial “city-killer”&nbsp;as­ter­oids.</p>
<p>The full extent of the threat of cosmic impacts did not become apparent until 1980, when UC Berkeley’s Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, and his son Walter, a Cal geologist and Big History pioneer, discovered that a clay layer in the Earth’s crust corresponding to the dinosaurs’ great die-off 65 million years ago was packed with iridium, a metal common in space rocks but exceedingly rare down here. They theorized that an asteroid (or comet) larger than Mt. Everest hit Earth with the force of the world’s entire nuclear arsenal, spawning a devastating tsunami and inferno-like temperatures, and blotting out the sun with soot. Within a few months, 75 percent of the world’s species were extinct. As Walter Alvarez wrote in his book on the subject, <i>T. Rex and the Crater of Doom,</i> “Earth would suffer cataclysmic damage in less time than it takes to read this&nbsp;sentence.”</p>
<p>The Alvarez theory was controversial but compelling, and 11 years later, the discovery of the Chicxulub crater—a yawning, 110-mile-wide depression in the Yucatán Peninsula—seemed to confirm what most experts already accepted: It was an asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. As if to underscore the point, in 1994 the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 barreled into Jupiter, triggering pyrotechnic mushroom clouds and gouging massive holes in the planet’s&nbsp;surface.</p>
<p>Fortunately, scientists estimate that an extinction-size asteroid (larger than 1 kilometer, give or take) only comes along every 500,000 years. NASA says it has located 93 percent of such “planet-killers” and is expected to find the rest of them by&nbsp;2020.</p>
<p>That still leaves potential “city-killer” asteroids like the one that hit Tunguska, which strike roughly once a century, unaccounted for. NASA’s best guess is that we have found a mere 1 percent of those, which means there are still roughly 10,000 undetected out there. Spotting such smaller-but-still-dangerous asteroids is difficult—they are, basically, black rocks hurtling through the vast blackness of space—and requires satellite telescopes. And those satellites in turn require big money, which is in short supply since the end of the Space Race, the Cold War–era competition between the United States and the Soviet Union for dominion over the heavens. As Marchis puts it, “NASA does not have anything under control. We just don’t know what’s out&nbsp;there.”</p>
<p>The month after the Chelyabinsk event, Congress held a hearing, Threats from Space: A Review of Private Sector Efforts to Track and Mitigate Asteroids and Meteors, Part II. It was a sober affair. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden estimated it would take his agency until 2030 to locate 90 percent of the city-killers. The committee chair, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, smiled tightly and said, “That’s not particularly&nbsp;reassuring.”</p>
<p>The international community isn’t doing any better. The United Nations convened an asteroid task force in 2008, bringing together an all-star team of astronauts, astrophysicists, and other experts. Based on the group’s recommendations, the UN is stitching together an ad hoc system of existing telescopes (grandly dubbed the International Asteroid Warning Network) to share data. It is also developing a blueprint for international cooperation to hammer out who would lead the response effort if an incoming asteroid is found. Again, the missing ingredient in these plans is&nbsp;money.</p>
<p>“This isn’t an astronomy problem,” says Karlene Roberts, a professor at the Haas School of Business who contributed her expertise in management and organizational behavior to that UN task force. Given the proper funding, we can find them, she says. “The biggest challenge is getting the world to agree that this is&nbsp;important.”</p>
<p>Ed Lu, a three-time astronaut, research scientist, and former adviser to Google’s philanthropic arm, also served on the task force. He chalks up the glacial progress to human nature. “The tragedy of the commons: When it’s everybody’s problem, it’s nobody’s problem.” With that in mind, Lu cofounded the Silicon Valley-based B612 Foundation (a nod to the asteroid in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s <i>The Little Prince</i>), a nonprofit with an admirably straightforward motto: Defending Earth Against&nbsp;Asteroids.</p>
<p>Aiming to find the city-killers missed by the world’s space agencies, B612 is overseeing the construction of a satellite named <i>Sentinel</i>. Outfitted with an infrared telescope suited to spotting the dark rocks, <i>Sentinel’</i>s orbit around the sun will allow it to detect asteroids like Chelyabinsk that ground-based telescopes don’t&nbsp;see.</p>
<p>The project, set for a 2017–18 launch atop a rocket made by SpaceX, the private space service started by Tesla cofounder Elon Musk, is bypassing the government entirely. An estimated $450 million price tag—a little less than the Air Force expects to shell out for each of its next-generation bombers—will be paid for Valley-style, through private fundraising. Going the private route wasn’t an ideological choice, Lu explains. It’s just that no one else was doing it. “We’re the only ones taking it&nbsp;seriously.”</p>
<p class="pullquote right">The film Armaged­don provided an in­ad­vert­ent il­lus­tra­tion of how not to save hu­man­ity. UC Berke­ley phys­i­cist Richard Muller re­mem­bers yelling at the screen as he watched. “They were say­ing, ‘Let’s blow that thing to smithereens!’ And I was shout­ing, ‘They’ve got it all wrong!’&nbsp;”</p>
<p>Once the world has a handle on the size of the threat, it can get to work on solutions, most of which involve nuclear weapons. Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb and patriarch of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, advocated a space-based nuclear defense system against asteroids. That idea never took off, but scientists are pursuing approaches that would ram nuclear payloads into oncoming asteroids. With sufficient warning—months or years, depending on the size of the asteroid—the nukes could nudge a rock out of its Earth-bound&nbsp;trajectory.</p>
<p>There are potential drawbacks, however. For one, nuclear weapons might simply break a dreadnought asteroid into smaller, irradiated chunks that would still hit Earth. <i>Armageddon,</i> the big-budget 1998 film in which Bruce Willis leads a team of oil drillers into space to nuke an oncoming asteroid, provided an inadvertent illustration of how not to save&nbsp;humanity.</p>
<p>Richard Muller, the Berkeley physicist whose book <i>Nemesis</i> posited the existence of a companion star to the sun responsible for launching the space rock that killed the dinosaurs, remembers yelling at the screen as he watched. “They were saying, ‘Let’s blow that thing to smithereens!’ And I was shouting, ‘They’ve got it all&nbsp;wrong!’”</p>
<p>So, what alternatives are there? Ed Lu coauthored a study exploring the use of a “gravity tractor”—an extremely heavy spaceship that would fly alongside an asteroid and, using the ship’s mass, gradually alter the course of the rock. Bear in mind, it wouldn’t work as a last-minute solution. The authors calculated that, given a 20-year lead, it would take a 20-ton tractor a year of towing to deflect a 200-meter&nbsp;asteroid.</p>
<p>Thankfully, there doesn’t appear to be anything menacing on the horizon for at least the next 100 years. Lu, however, reminds me that we don’t have a full picture of what’s out there. “That’s the urgency,” he says. “We just don’t know.” He compares an asteroid strike to preventable disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. “They knew the levees weren’t up to snuff, but they did nothing,” he says. “If we get hit, that’s not bad luck. That’s a&nbsp;choice.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, if we’re inclined to worry about the end of the world, where should asteroids rank on the list? Muller says it depends. Probability, after all, is a funny&nbsp;thing.</p>
<p>“We’re small targets, and the Earth has a lot of empty space.” Then again, he adds, “the big ones that’ll devastate the whole Earth? There’s no hiding from them. Just ask the&nbsp;dinosaurs.” </p>
<p><i>Chris Smith, M.J. ’01, regularly writes for </i>California.<i> Two of his articles garnered Gold Awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education in&nbsp;2013.</i></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-15 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">From the <a href="/california-magazine/summer-2014-apocalypse">Summer 2014 Apocalypse</a> issue of <i>California</i>.</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Filed under: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/science-health">Science + Health</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-5 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Related topics: <a href="/california-magazine/topic/asteroid">asteroid</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/astronomy">astronomy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/uc-berkeley">UC Berkeley</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/seti-institute">SETI Institute</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/frank-marchis">Frank Marchis</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/richard-muller">Richard Muller</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/chelyabinsk">Chelyabinsk</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/tunguska">Tunguska</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/cosmic-impact">cosmic impact</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/walter-alvarez">Walter Alvarez</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/t-rex-and-crater-doom">T. Rex and the Crater of Doom</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/nasa">NASA</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/karlene-roberts">Karlene Roberts</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/haas-school-business">Haas School of Business</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/ed-lu">Ed Lu</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/b612-foundation">B612 Foundation</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/spacex">SpaceX</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/california-magazine/topic/armageddon">Armageddon</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photo-credit field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Image source: Andrew Archer</div></div></div>Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:22:22 +0000Alexander Helmintoller6066 at https://alumni.berkeley.edu